by Mia Marconi
When she came back, I asked, ‘Are they all yours?’
‘No, I foster,’ she said.
I hadn’t even heard of fostering and without knowing any more about it I said, ‘I’d like to do that.’
This woman made it look so much fun, even though it was chaotic. There she was with all these kids, sitting in the restaurant having a laugh, with pizza falling on the floor and drinks going over, but it was obvious she loved it and obvious that she loved the kids and that they loved her. The anarchy of it all would have put most people off, but to me it just looked as though it was a happy table.
Going back to work was not something I was thinking about when this girl talked about fostering, but immediately I thought it was something that would fit in with my lifestyle. The opportunity came up and I grabbed it.
Before our meeting I had a very negative view of fostering – because of my mum and uncle’s experience in Wales – but I could see that this was something totally different, so I told the woman I was interested. She said, ‘There’s a real shortage of foster carers in Bermondsey. Give me your number and I’ll give it to a social worker.’ I did, then went home and that was the end of it. I wasn’t expecting anything to happen, but the next day the phone rang and it was Peter Inman from social services.
‘I’m a social worker,’ he said. ‘I hear you’re interested in fostering. Shall we meet?’ After that short phone call, Peter would become a big part of my life for the next ten years.
I loved him; he was a down-to-earth northerner with a good sense of humour. He looked like a typical social worker – slightly geeky with his rucksack and desert boots – but you could have good banter with him.
When Martin came home that night I said, ‘I’ve got a meeting with a social worker and I’m thinking about fostering.’
To which he replied, ‘I’m not fostering. There’s no way I’m going to foster. Forget about it.’
We didn’t discuss it again, but I went ahead with plans to foster our first child anyway, because I knew once a baby arrived, Martin would come round. He did.
We lived in a borough where poverty was rife. Bermondsey was no different to any inner-city London district, with its wealthy and poor areas. In the wealthy part people lived in five-storey Georgian houses and drove Audis or Range Rovers. In the deprived part you regularly saw drug-dealers hanging around on street corners. It was comical, really. No one was supposed to know – the dealer and user did no more than bump their fists together – but you always knew money and drugs were changing hands. Then there were the alcoholics who sat on the park benches drinking cans of Special Brew for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They sat there, bleary-eyed, swearing and cursing at each other and occasionally starting a fight.
Like most other adults on the planet, these troubled people had children, and for some it helped them turn their lives around, but for others it pushed them further into their addictions – and their children ended up in care.
So it was against this backdrop that I started my training at the local foster carers’ training centre. Sometimes Francesca and Ruby would come with me and enjoy themselves in the crèche provided by the borough, and at other times Mum would look after them. They were happy either way and I was enjoying a new challenge.
There were twelve of us on the course and I loved every minute of it. I sailed through most of the training on challenging behaviour, and quickly got to grips with bereavement, but there was one aspect that I found particularly difficult – sex abuse.
The most heart-breaking fact I discovered was that paedophiles tend to know the children they abuse. An abuser is commonly someone a child trusts, has grown up with and has shared family times with. They are the very people who should love and cherish a child in their family, and the very people whom a child loves and cherishes, but they are also the people who take advantage of that and end up destroying the children in their care.
The whole policy surrounding sex abuse troubled me. Once an abused child plucks up the courage to tell an adult what is happening, they are pretty much immediately taken away from the very people they love and placed with a foster carer until the child-protection work is completed. It is obvious that this is to keep the child safe, I understand that, but children often interpret that as a punishment for telling. I always thought there must be a better way round it, like removing the adult from the home or from the vicinity of the child, but it’s never handled that way.
Once the abuse is out in the open, the child’s behaviour can become extreme. It’s likely that there have been warning signs. Typical ones are nightmares, moodiness, secrecy and clinginess, or a child may develop issues around eating – pretty much the same signs you would get if a child was suffering any trauma, such as divorce or problems with friends. Sex abuse, though, comes with an increased awareness of sex and sexual practices. You can imagine what a shock it is when a four-year-old starts talking about blow jobs or throwing four-letter words around as if they are talking about the Teletubbies. Advanced sexual behaviour in a child is always a worrying sign.
To an untrained adult, it can look as though the child is naughty. Bad behaviour, though, is often a cry for help, a cry they have no idea how to verbalise, so it comes out in misbehaviour. It is hard to take, though. For example, it is not unusual for a sexually abused child to smear their own faeces on the wall, develop problems with anger or to totally withdraw.
Sometimes I speak to adults who have been abused as children and who kept the abuse secret, never telling a soul until they reached adulthood, and I always wonder how no one noticed anything. How did no one spot that they were frightened, withdrawn and moody? Maybe people did, but it is a fact that most cases of sex abuse happen to children who are vulnerable in the first place, so perhaps there was just no one around to care.
They tell you how to deal with all this behaviour during training, but the reality is something else. Nothing can really prepare you for the task of trying to heal a child traumatised by sex abuse. At the time, I thought I was not ready to take that on and made a mental note to let Peter know.
During training you have lots of home visits, when social workers go into your background and find out if there are any mental-health problems within the family, whether anyone suffers from depression or if anyone takes drugs or drinks heavily. Family members who often visit your house all have to have police checks, and Martin and I both had to have a full medical. True, the assessment is quite intrusive, but it is similar to adopting a child, and with these vulnerable children no one is going to take any unnecessary risks.
A few days after I was passed as a suitable carer, social services rang to tell me they had a placement for me. She was a three-day-old baby girl called Sofia, they said, whose mother was an unmarried woman in her early twenties from Italy. What were the chances of that? Peter laughed and agreed it was incredible that my first baby would have almost the exact same story as my dad. It was like history repeating itself and I was being given the responsibility to turn what could be a terrible experience for this innocent child into a good one. All I can say is that fate has a really funny way of working its way into your life.
I immediately began having flashbacks as every moment of my father’s story played itself out, frame by frame, like a film in my head. I felt his rejection and humiliation and how he had struggled to fit in, and I felt all that for Sofia too.
My father was a grown man, a grandfather and a husband, and Sofia was an innocent baby born fifty years later, yet they had the same story, the same start in life, and I hoped with all my heart that Sofia’s life would take a different path to my dad’s. I hoped that her guardian angel had other plans for her.
One thing I did realise immediately was that this was going to change my life in ways I could not foresee. That odd feeling I’d had all those months before, that some other path would open up for me, I now knew what it meant.
Chapter Five
Sofia’s mother had given birth in hospital and then dis
appeared without telling anyone where she was going. On the day Sofia was born, a hospital social worker called me. She was rather cold in her approach, giving me very little information about Sofia and basically just wanting the names and addresses of my GP and health visitor. She ended the conversation saying a social worker from my borough would be bringing Sofia to my house sometime in the next few days. I put the phone down and wondered if it was necessary for her to be that abrupt.
I waited and waited for Sofia to arrive – it was almost as if I was waiting to go into labour myself. I prepared Francesca and Ruby by talking about Sofia from morning till night. I told them we were going to get a new little baby, and asked if they would help me bath her and push her in the pram. They asked what colour eyes she had, why her mummy couldn’t look after her and where her daddy was. I said that her mummy was unwell and I knew nothing about her daddy. Then they wanted to know how long she would be with us and whether she could sleep in their bedroom, and they each chose a dolly from their collection to give to her.
Social services provide all the equipment you need for a new baby and they had sent over a catalogue full of things we could order. We spent an afternoon going through the pages, choosing anything that was pink. We ordered a pram, a Moses basket, a cot, a bottle steriliser, pink babygrows, pink blankets and a pink coat. In fact, every item was pink.
It was exciting when the boxes arrived and we sat and opened them together.
We talked about what we would do with Sofia when she arrived, but I made sure the girls understood that she was not staying with us forever, and that although she was living with us and would be treated as part of the family I wanted them to know that she was not their sister. I added that I was looking after babies whose families had problems and were unable to look after them, but that they would hopefully go home in the future.
It was a Friday afternoon in mid December and I had just arrived home from the nursery with Francesca and Ruby when the doorbell went. All three of us raced to the front door, pushing each other out of the way to get there first. I won, of course. The social worker was standing there with a bundle and it was almost like the storks were delivering a baby, just like in Dumbo. Every Disney film has a fairy-tale ending and I was hoping that Sofia’s life would be no different. I wanted the ‘happily ever after’ so badly for her I could almost touch it.
I had imagined an olive-skinned baby with dark hair, but Sofia had blonde hair and fair skin. It was a real shock, because her mum was from southern Italy, where everyone is very dark. No one seemed to know anything about her father, so Sofia could have inherited his looks. Whatever her parentage, she was a very pretty baby and I could not imagine how anyone could walk away from her. Baby modelling agencies would have snapped her up if they’d had the chance.
There are two social workers involved with every placement – one who acts for the foster family and one who represents the foster child – and they both arrived with her. Peter was ours and we had built up quite a relationship, so it was nice for me to see a familiar face. It made it a special occasion. Sofia’s was a woman who was quite serious.
Although her mother had gone full term in her pregnancy, Sofia was tiny and she only weighed about 6lbs. She was so small that even newborn clothes seemed to swamp her. I knew very little about her, not because social services didn’t want to tell me, but because they didn’t know much either. What they could tell me was that Sofia’s mum had checked herself into a local hospital, had delivered Sofia and left without telling anyone where she was going. Before she left, she had written Sofia’s name on a piece of paper and pinned it to the blanket in her cot. That was the last thing she did for her, give her a name.
After that, social services got involved, but there were no records of Sofia’s mother anywhere: no ante-natal classes, no doctors, no address. She just turned up, delivered her baby, slept, left the hospital and disappeared.
Information only came to light months later when an Italian couple in their fifties finally turned up at the social services offices to say that they were friends of the family, and that Sofia’s mum’s name was Maria.
They explained how Maria’s family had contacted them from Italy and asked for their help. The couple were from the same village and had remained in touch with them for many years. They remembered Maria growing up and her family had asked them to look after her while she came over to England to have an abortion. They agreed to help, as Maria had got pregnant by a married man who had refused to acknowledge her.
Maria had flown over from Italy when she was seven months pregnant, believing she was only three or four months gone, so as it turned out it was too late for her to terminate the pregnancy. She then went missing about a month before she gave birth. When Maria didn’t return to their house, the couple began visiting local hospitals until they finally found where she had had her baby, but by that time Sofia had been placed with me and the hospital directed them to social services.
I struggled with the contradictions of the Roman Catholic faith that dictates no sex before marriage because sex out of wedlock is deemed to be a mortal sin.
I could picture Maria and her parents, their faces wet with tears, clutching their rosary beads, sitting on a wooden bench, praying to the Almighty and listening to the priest repeat, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit …’ while calmly discussing how to deal with the problem.
Someone – either Maria or her parents – had decided that the baby should be aborted, but wasn’t that a mortal sin? Was terminating the pregnancy better than living with the shame of being an unmarried mother and the shame that would bring on their family?
The most important thing Catholics are taught as children, and we are told it over and over and over again, is that you need to practise forgiveness. I wondered who would forgive Maria and who she could turn to in her hour of need? I wondered if she could forgive herself?
Fate decided that Maria would give birth to her daughter, but at only three days old, her history was already dramatic, but I felt secure in the knowledge that we could give her all the love and attention that she would never get from her own family – like my dad had never had from his.
We had a little welcoming party for everyone, with sandwiches and cake, and Sofia seemed to settle straight away. Francesca and Ruby just smiled and smiled, and when Martin came home he went over and gave Sofia a little kiss.
Sofia’s social worker looked overwhelmed at the happiness we all showed and said she knew Sofia was going to be loved with us. She gave me lots of forms, and I went over them quickly as I wasn’t really listening to anything she was saying – I just wanted a cuddle. She said she would visit in a few weeks, and that a health visitor would be in touch within a day.
Excitement filled the house. My entire family kept phoning and coming round to see her. It was truly like I had just given birth. Mum was the first to come round. She picked up Sofia and cuddled her, and then Dad arrived half an hour later. He was all over her, kissing her and talking to her in Italian, calling her ‘Sofia bambina’. He told her she had beautiful eyes. It made me feel really, really upset, because I was so aware of his family history, and yet he could still find compassion for this little child.
I never had much of a look-in with Sofia that first week as Francesca and Ruby took care of that. She was their own living dolly and they had no intention of putting her down.
They loved feeding her. I would sit them on the settee with a pillow under their arm so they could give her a bottle. They would sit and talk to her in her rocking chair and shake her rattle, and every time she cried they would stroke her hair or try to distract her. They were very sweet with her and I was overwhelmed with love for them.
Of course, they fought over who would push her in the pram and who would rock her in her chair. As the oldest, Francesca usually won, leaving Ruby crying, ‘Mum, it’s my turn!’
I was forever pulling them apart and it didn’t matter how many times I said to them, ‘You do
it today, Francesca, and you do it tomorrow, Ruby,’ they still fought over her. But that’s the reality of family life. Anyone who believes it can be like The Waltons is not living in the real world.
Sofia slept in a Moses basket next to our bed. She was such a good baby. She rarely cried, except if she was hungry or wet, and physically, although she was small, she was fine. She only had one problem and that was with her eye.
When she was eleven days old I noticed that one eye was a bit sticky. I took her to see the doctor, who said it was conjunctivitis, gave me some eye ointment and told me I had to bathe her eyes every day with warm water. Sofia’s health visitor said the same thing, and as conjunctivitis is very common in babies and I had already had two of my own, I knew this was the right diagnosis and was not that concerned.
It was a Friday when I took Sofia to see the doctor and on Sunday I went to visit my mum. Sofia’s eye was getting worse and by the time I was ready to leave it was really swollen – if you touched her eyelid, big drops of pus came out. I was getting worried and Mum said that you couldn’t mess around with eyes, so I took Sofia straight to A&E at Moorfields Eye Hospital. It is the best eye hospital in the world, so I knew we would be in good hands.
When we got there a doctor looked at her and asked me to sit in a room called STD, which I thought was short for ‘Standard’. Well, I was a new carer and a bit naïve – it actually stood for ‘Sexually Transmitted Diseases’. Inside the room they turned all the lights out and gently opened Sofia’s eye, which was now firmly glued shut. When I saw what was underneath her eyelid I could not believe it. It was completely red, there was no sign of white anywhere and the lid was swollen with pus. I was so shocked I cried for her.
The doctor told me it was most likely the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia that was the cause, and that her mum must have had it when she was pregnant and passed it on to Sofia. I was dumbfounded. It would not have crossed my mind in a million years that that would be the diagnosis.